Sarah K. Valdez
“The Right Wing in Scandinavia: How Institutions Facilitate the Success of Radical Groups”
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Abstract
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Despite similarities on many cultural, institutional, and social dimensions, there is a striking difference between the success of radical right parties in Denmark and Sweden. Denmark has a popular radical right party with an anti-immigrant platform. Sweden, on the other hand, has a similar proportion of non-Western immigrants and no radical-right representation in Parliament. I hypothesize that this variation is due to differences in refugee resettlement policies. In Denmark, family-reunifications are limited and refugees are placed in municipalities throughout the country; therefore, the proportion of non-Westerners is increasing relatively uniformly across the country. In Sweden, family-reunifications are not restricted and refugees are not allocated evenly across municipalities. The result has been growing clusters of “immigrant ghettoes” in the suburbs of the largest cities. It appears that the Danish policy of distributing immigrants has also distributed anti-immigrant sentiment. I will analyze how these population trends affect support for radical right parties at the precinct level, and, using agent based modeling, determine how individuals’ votes for radical right parties generate parliamentary representation within different sets of electoral rules. This will provide an empirical link between the effects of individual level preferences, as indicated by voting behavior, and the mediating effects of institutional arrangements, measured by party representation. This will shed light on how institutions constrain the influence of individuals and groups embedded within those institutions
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